This thesis takes as its starting point Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s argument that it is the way in which “Third World” women’s narratives are read and understood that is crucial, together with the need to locate them contextually. My original contribution to knowledge is to develop a deconstructive, cultural analysis through the re–reading of a selection of core postcolonial women’s texts written in former colonial societies, at a time prior to the full emergence of postcolonialism as a set of theoretical concepts and before feminism had developed its major contribution to academic scholarship. These theories are examined in the first three chapters of the thesis. This re–reading is of texts which arguably prefigured in many ways some of the main debates later articulated in postcolonial feminist criticism, thus (re–)interpreting them through a contemporary, critical lens. The objective of the textual analysis, among other things, is to underline the function of literary mapping in postcolonial women’s writing and the ways in which this resonates with key issues in postcolonial feminist studies. For example, the texts subvert the figure of the “universal woman” challenged by several critics, undermine images of women’s sameness, and transform marginalising spaces such as prison and home into sites of possible resistance. Overall, the main contribution of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, the interpretation of postcolonial women’s writing as a metachronous discourse of literary mapping in order to reclaim rather than deny the difference and complexity inherent in women’s texts and identities. This lends a wider dimension to the literary representations of women and justifies my attempt to order the texts as following an inverted rite of passage. Secondly, this thesis demonstrates that postcolonial women’s writing constitutes a discourse of literary activism and a cultural archive of prismatic female narratives which demands a responsive reading of the texts. This is to form a collective, critical consciousness from which, it is hoped, present and future communities of women can learn to change their lives.

The Beckettian creature is a product of dehumanisation and endures a variety of irresolvable tensions which culminate in a contingent mode of being that subsists in the nostalgia or hope for an authentic, meaningful life. This thesis examines Samuel Beckett's evocation of the 'creature' as an ontological concept to make the case for the oblique historical and political significance of his artistic forms. My work traces the aesthetic, biopolitical and humanistic resonance of the creature to contribute new ways of analysing Beckett's 'art of failure' in the post-Holocaust context. Through close readings of Beckett's prose and drama, particularly texts from the middle period, including Mol/ay, Ma/one Dies, The Unnamab/e, Waiting/or Godot and Endgame, I explicate four arenas of creaturely life in Beckett. Each chapter attends to a particular theme - testimony, power, humour and survival- to analyse a range of pressures and impositions that precipitate the creaturely state of suspension. I draw on the philosophical and theoretical writings of Theodor Adomo, Giorgio Agamben, Waiter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to relate Beckett's creatures to a framework of critical theory that addresses the human condition and the status of art in the second half of the twentieth century. The key findings of this thesis are that Beckett's creatures traverse the edge of a bare life devoid of meaning, but live on through the debased idea of the human as they negotiate pressing obligations and melancholic repetition compulsions. Beckett invents author-narrators and narrative modes replete with epistemological and expressive failures, which act as an appropriate aesthetic response and pertinent reflection of the destabilised human after the Holocaust. As such, Beckett conveys the anti-humanist vision that attends the perverse or ineffective performance of humanist assumptions.

The term post traumatic stress is routinely used to describe the psychological experiences of soldiers returning from war. It is used here to describe the effects it has on the families of PTS victims, in particular children. Hunting Captain Henley is a novel which explores the long term effects of a father’s post traumatic stress on a son’s (intellectual) development. It tracks the progress of the narrator from childhood to adulthood as he sets about tracking down the (English) Royal Signals Captain who allegedly bullied his dad into shooting Arab civilians during the Ismaelia police uprising at Suez in 1951. In his 1919 book Scottish Literature: Character and Influence G. Gregory Smith first coined the phrase Caledonian Antisyzygy to spotlight the zigzag of contradictions at the heart of Scottish Literature, especially under the stress of foreign (in particular English) influence. The term has since been used to point at the schizophrenia at the heart of Scottishness. The novel considers the dual influences of the English (language) on Scottish writing and families. As a prologue to the book a commentary is provided. Scotland’s Fascist Voice addresses the unexplored area of the present-day fascist consciousness in Scotland. It does so by firstly acknowledging Scotland’s role in the creation of the British Empire then delineates a developing contemporary identity borne out of that imperial experience. It examines the significance of The Raucle Tongue, hitherto uncollected prose by Hugh MacDiarmid, in particular his Plea for a Scottish Fascism. The remaining chapters of the commentary explain the significance of a form of cultural repression at work in Scottish society and showcase the fascist style mindset and its incumbent voice. It is concluded that as both victims and perpetators of Empire Scots must now acknowledge this duality of experience and carry forth its impact on both our language and identity into the 21st century.

This thesis examines the ontology of the cyborg body and the politics inherent to cultural manifestations of that image, and focuses on the links between glass and human-machine integration, while tracing the dangerous political affinities that emerge when such links are exposed. In the first chapter, the cyborg’s persistent construction as a cultural Black Box is uncovered using the theories of Bruno Latour and W. Ross Ashby. It examines why the temptation to explore the cyborg solely through close readings of contemporary incarnations leads only to confusion and misreading. The second chapter builds on the work of the first by placing the cyborg within its proper historical context, and provides a detailed examination of the period in which the cyborg was not only named, but also transformed into a physical possibility with an existent political agenda. It then investigates the phallogocentricity, hyper-masculinity, and inherent racism of the cyborg body, and demonstrates how representations of human-machine integration reinforce the pre-existing racist, hetero-normative, patriarchal hegemony of the Cold War. The discussion then explores the issue of the emergent property in the cyborg body; specifically, the figure’s persistent construction as a ‘body of glass.’ It demonstrates how cyborgs are not only associated with objects like the mirror, but also how that figure is tied to visual motifs such as the double or doppelganger. Accordingly, the theories of Jacques Lacan are employed to elucidate the issues that arise when one of the most pervasive images in Western culture also doubles as a reflector. The final chapter seeks to expand upon the framework provided by Lacan, and examines the cyborg not as a mirror, but as a portal. Subsequently, this section challenges not only the cyborg’s current status as a posthuman figure, but also current theoretical assumptions which frame the cyborg as the point of transition from humanism to posthumanism.

This thesis examines representations of exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction and how they produce the boundary between human and nonhuman animals. Particularly, it scrutinises how violent engagements with animals participate in the construction of masculine identities and how these reflect and contribute to imperialist conceptions of ecology. I contend that the ostensibly fundamental distinction of humans from their animal others emerges in this context as compromised and unstable: a complex interplay of kinship and difference rather than an innate, monolithic and hierarchical opposition. This argument both continues the postcolonial dismantling of empire’s logic of domination and develops the recentering of the nonhuman in environmentally focussed criticism, but, most vitally, signals the relation between these fields: the necessary interdependence of human and nonhuman interests, of environmental activism and global social justice. Chapter One begins by examining recent critical interventions in the colonial adventures of G. A Henty, John Buchan, G. M. Fenn, R. M. Ballantyne, H. Rider Haggard and Paul du Chaillu. While intimately involved with an imperialist agenda that seeks to assimilate foreign environments and their denizens into colonial order, such texts also draw on a long-standing literary tradition that relishes wilderness as the theatre of narrative excitement and heroic testing. Through analysis of Henty’s Rujub the Juggler (1895) and Buchan’s A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), I illustrate how imperial romance simultaneously narrates the symbolically powerful domestication of animal others through depictions of hunting and warfare and embraces animal otherness through a fetishistic investment in animal bodies re-presented as a panoply of imperial trophies and trinkets. Exploring further the ambiguities of domination, Chapter Two investigates colonial natural history as a material and discursive violence that forcefully integrates animals into Western patterns of signification. Adventure fiction’s role in this, however, emerges in Henty’s By Sheer Pluck (1884) and Fenn’s Nat the Naturalist (1882) as a conflicted celebration of restraint and aggression; the masculinities that such texts aim to construct and marshal suggesting an uncomfortable intimacy of civilisation and savagery that besets imperialist racial and species hierarchies and the unitary relation of the genre to colonial power. The themes of race, species and narrative form are developed in Chapter Three through a close reading of the cultural history of gorillas in the second half of the nineteenth century in the romanticised travel writing of Paul du Chaillu and the fictions of R. M. Ballantyne. The ‘invention’ of these extraordinary animals troubles the generic boundaries between romance and natural history and raises pointed questions about what it means to be human. A rhetoric of hygiene and contamination emerges as adventure heroes consistently find themselves deprived of their upright human dignity and floundering in a series of mucks and mires. The relation of sanitation and species forms a significant element of degenerationist discourse and the starting point for Chapter Four. Metropolitan decay is recurrently implicated in a potential devolution that threatens empire with both practical and philosophical dilemmas. Paradoxically, in Haggard’s Nada the Lily (1892) and Buchan’s Lodge the cure for this malaise is figured as another form of becoming animal as the enervated urbanite recovers in the colonial wilds. Such naturalisation of colonial violence leads into a discussion of the psychological undercurrents of male aggression. While the eroticisation of hunting is crucial, the imperial romance reveals male sexualities that hinge, most notably in Ballantyne’s 1861 The Gorilla Hunters, on imaginings of vulnerability as much as on fantasies of self-empowerment. In conclusion, I posit the human/animal border as one permeable at many points and follow Val Plumwood in delineating a selfhood ultimately in relation to, rather than separated from, the other and radically divergent from dualistic, colonial conceptualisations of human identity.

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

The Mabinogi Tetralogy by Evangeline Walton consists of four novels: Prince of Annwn (1974), The Children of Llyr (1971), The Song of Rhiannon (1972) and The Island of the Mighty (1970, first published under the title The Virgin and the Swine, 1936). This thesis locates the Tetralogy as a founding text of modern feminist fantasy fiction by analysing its rewriting of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. The analysis demonstrates how feminist debate, Welsh medieval literature and Celtic history combine to produce an important, if hitherto largely ignored, contribution to both fantasy fiction and women’s writing. Walton re-visions the Mabinogi as a tale of a fictional Celtic Wales’s transition from a mother-worshipping tribal society to the patriarchal, monotheistic power structure that governed the construction of the medieval text. The fantasy genre which Walton helped form enables the author to use magic as a symbol of female agency. The female characters in The Mabinogion Tetralogy with the strongest connection with the fictional deity referred to as the Mother – Rhiannon and Arianrhod – also have the highest degree of magical capabilities. Conversely, those who lose their connection with the Mother – Branwen, Penardim and Blodeuwedd – become subject to the control of their male counterparts. A feminist reading of the Tetralogy, which draws upon the work of Luce Irigaray, reveals Walton’s series as a story about the cultural demise of Mother-worship and the institutionalisation of a patriarchal society that permanently re-defined gender roles. An examination of Walton’s source material elucidates how the author uses historical research to provide a realistic framework for the Tetralogy. By examining how Walton merges history with fantasy, and a medieval text with modern feminist thought, this thesis argues for a re-evaluation of Evangeline Walton as one of the most important developers of feminist fantasy fiction.

This thesis examines representations of monstrosity in Old English literature. The literary studies herein examine the construction of monstrous individuals in Old English poetry, and I demonstrate that literary monstrous types converge and develop a tradition of monstrosity that informs the monsters of the Liber monstrorum and Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East. I argue that, for Old English writers, a monster was not necessarily a deformed being located in the distant lands of the East; rather, the literary and linguistic evidence suggests that any man or woman had the potential to become a monstrous type within the conventional social order. The Old English works examined are Precepts, Maxims I and II, Vainglory, Judith, The Battle of Maldon and Beowulf because each text reveals that Old English writers utilised binary sex and gender differences to define the social roles and behaviours appropriate for the masculine and feminine. According to critical theory, gender is a performance and both men and women must therefore prove their gender identities by behaving in a certain way and fulfilling the roles deemed appropriate for their gender. In failing to conform to the expectations of their gender, a gender-monstrosity matrix works upon the social transgressors, excluding them from the social order and distorting their gender identities into a monstrously confused yet recognisable construct. In the literary works examined, the monstrous type is not only the antithesis to the idealised masculine and feminine, but is also a malevolent figure whose anti-social words and actions transgress gender expectations. I demonstrate that the danger posed by the monster is not only physical, but also psychological. The monster threatens the communal harmony of the social order because, in Old English literature, monstrosity emerges in the form of an uncontrolled riot that incites unrest and enmity in the hall, or as words and outward actions that are purposely deployed (or withheld) in order to demoralise, destroy, and even consume the masculine symbolic order in the pursuit of self-gratification.

This dissertation studies the representation of calendars and the idea of custom in Tudor English literature. Social historians have demonstrated that the early modern English calendar was anything but stable, and that the nature of days and their observances was often hotly disputed. This is a study of how authors of literature reflected and produced calendar consciousness in the face of changing systems of time reckoning. I focus upon texts which explore alternative models of social time: Thomas More's Utopia, Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender and Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and a cluster of texts published in 1603. These works share the recognition that calendars are at least as much the product of custom as they are of nature, and are therefore potentially open to social adaptation and political appropriation. The idea of custom as "second nature" is both an object of study in the dissertation and provides its general methodology and theoretical orientation. In early modern usage, "custom" could refer to much of what we might call both "ideology" and "culture." In its most general sense, however, custom simply referred to individual habit and social praxis, and was one means by which particular activities could be politically legitimated. My goal is to demonstrate what many early modern authors recognized: that a calendar is both a product of custom and a framework within which social behaviour is produced. When confronted with other systems of temporal organization, authors were encouraged to reflect upon their own, and to consider the possibilities in alternative social orders.

This thesis follows recent scholarly interest in the British fin de siècle, focussing on the artist and the notion of art within the context of capitalisation and rapidly changing social strata. It claims that the artist can be understood as a socially orientated rather than purely economically motivated player, who tries to position himself and his art within a distinctly transformed cultural landscape. It demonstrates how many texts and art works of the fin de siècle are permeated by a socio-critical and didactical discourse, which serves to legitimize the artist and his art work on the one hand, and aims at the aesthetic education of his audience on the other. This approach allows for a reconciliation of the paradoxical co-existence of socio-critical engagement and the concept of ‘art for art’s sake’ in fin-de-siècle art works. Chapter One, “Leaving the Ivory Tower,” provides a temporal framework for the discussion of the fin de siècle by tracing the development of the eighteenth-century, idealized notion of the artist through the writings of John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. It also gestures towards the connection of this tradition to Theodore Adorno’s understanding of ‘social art’. Examining Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” within the context of this temporal trajectory, this chapter aims to establish an understanding of the paradoxical demands that face the artist in the light of capitalisation and the development of a mass readership at the end of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two, “Social Aestheticism,” investigates Oscar Wilde’s “The Soul of Man under Socialism” and several of his fairy tales and George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man in view of their affiliation with Aestheticism. These texts, while insisting on the autonomy of art and voicing their opinions in the disdainful tone of the disinterested artist, are striking because of the social awareness and criticism that they express. By showing how these opposing concepts aim for the legitimization of the artist, this chapter draws attention to the aesthetic-didactical element of Aestheticism, positioning its artists as social critics and educators rather than otherworldly figures. Chapter Three, “A Map of Utopia,” considers William Morris’ News from Nowhere as an example of the artist as visionary and the importance of artistic imagination in the process of social evolution and change. It argues that Morris’ utopia can be read as supporting the concept of autonomous art in that it expresses the omnipresence of art and the realization of a perfect society that this entails. As such, the text demonstrates the social effectiveness of autonomous art which, in turn, supports an understanding of the artist as social agent. Chapter Four, “Periodical Education,” looks at The Yellow Book as an example of audience education and the positioning of the artist through the medium of art. It contrasts The Yellow Book’s aspiration to be an ‘art for art’s sake’ publication with its socio-critical content, evidencing how the concept of autonomous art is used at the fin de siècle for the selection and education of an audience. Chapter Five, “The Author at a Distance,” examines Max Beerbohm’s essays in the light of their aesthetic-didactical tone and the artist-audience relationship they establish. By including a selection of Beerbohm’s later essays, this chapter also gestures towards the difference between the artist-audience relationship implied in fin-de-siècle art as opposed to Modernist art. This attests to the distinct character of fin-de-siècle art. Further, the chapter investigates the effects of these aspects in terms of artist legitimization and the promotion of autonomous art, and thus shows how Beerbohm’s essays contribute to an understanding of fin-de-siècle art as didactical, aesthetic and autonomous at the same time. In conclusion, this thesis reveals how artists at the fin de siècle used their art in order to legitimize an idealized position of the artist within society, to promote the separation between art and life and to create an audience that would appreciate and understand this view. It thus also demonstrates how the paradox between the concept of autonomous art and artistic socio-critical engagement can be reconciled.